Pigs, dogs and Big Brother

Gotta love these pigs. They are giving the finger to Big Brother, well, more their cute, wiggly tails. So we know that pets are implanted with RFID chips (usually under the skin between the shoulder blades in a dog or cat and providing the owner’s details together with information about the animal, which is logged onto a central database.) But RFID technology is also used for farm animals – to trace livestock through their life cycle. Microchip implants can identify an animal’s origin so if there is an outbreak of a disease, such as mad cow, the RFID-tracking system will identify the farm from which the animal carrying the disease came from. If you ask me, this is Animal Farm meets Big Brother. And one day, in the not too distant future, humans will be implanted with RFID chips and our daily activities and life-cycle will be tracked. But back to the pigs.

You’re about to watch a short video of smart pigs in Essex, UK. These pigs are equipped with (rather cumbersome) RFID-enabled collars that limit piggy’s food to a certain amount per day. The pig goes through a gate and the RFID collar works out how much food to dish out. You then see poor piggy looking sad that there is no more food as it leaves the feed chute area. But in a classic case of learned behaviour, some of the pigs have figured out the collar is the key to more food. And this is happening on a number of independent farms not just the one farm. Some pigs ditch the collars (yeah, they look uncomfortable) and other clever pigs come along, pick up the collar and…carry it to the feed gate a second time. So the animal that often ends up as bacon on the breakfast buffet is smart enough to make the mental connection between collar and more dinner and is teaching other pigs to subvert Big Brother.

And in another story of learned behaviour (this time without surveillance overtones) – have you heard about the Moscow dogs? Stray dogs have turned into canine commuters, using Moscow’s subway system to full advantage. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many industries moved from Moscow into the surrounding suburbs and stray dogs used the industrial complexes as shelter and for food scavenging – so when industry moved, they moved too. What’s fascinating about this is that the dogs apparently work together, helping each other to learn the length of time they need to spend on a train to the suburbs; what stop to get off; and which carriages to travel in. And just like human commuters, they often take a nap on the train. There’s even a Russian website devoted to these metro dogs. Apparently, the dogs wait patiently on the station for the train to pull in and they have learned to use the traffic lights, crossing the streets with pedestrians. And they have learned innovative tactics to easily obtain food from humans. In the evenings, they hop on the train and return to Moscow. Check out this YouTube video – you can see the dog is snoozing, the announcement is saying the train is reaching a station; the dog stirs; looks around to see people are getting off; and calmly saunters out the door, ready for a day’s scavenging.

Social media revolution

Here’s a really interesting video on social media. I have to admit I haven’t heard of Hulu have you? Hang on….let me see….okay found it. Hulu offers commercially supported streaming video of TV shows and movies from NBC, Fox, ABC and other networks. I found one of my fav TV shows on it: Glee. But bummer: Hulu can only stream videos within the United States.

Some really powerful stats in this video, which suggests that social media is the biggest social shift since the Industrial Revolution. Here are a few tidbits:

• social media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the internet (frankly, I reckon porn is dated stuff associated with Hugh Hefner and the 1980s);
• it took radio 38 years to reach 50 million users; TV 13 years; and Facebook – less than 9 months to reach 100 million users (scary);
• if Facebook was a country, it would be the 4th largest;
• the fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year old females.

Fascinating stuff. Watch the video and tell me what you think.

Economist social media video

The Economist has a rather nifty “Did You Know” video on social media. It’s US-centric but contains some interesting stats and facts for those of us into social media. Here are some interesting tidbits:

• 2,000,000 TVs are in the bathrooms of Americans. Dudes, the bathroom is for bathing, cleaning your teeth – that sort of stuff – not for watching the latest episode of Mad Men, as tempting as this might be;
• newspaper circulation is down 7 million in the last 25 years;
• but in the last 5 years, unique readers of online newspapers are up 30 million.

And here’s the thing I thought was staggering – more video was uploaded to YouTube in the last two months than if ABC, NBC and CBS had been airing new content 24/7/365 since 1948 (which was the year ABC started broadcasting). Amazing.

Watch the video. Oh and if you don’t know what Rickrolling is, go here.

How Orwellian

Looks like the European Union is up to its old tricks with surveillance but this time it is basically creating a surveillance monster called Project Indect. Heard of it? Tens of thousands of Euros are being poured into a system that will detect threats and abnormal behaviour across Europe. EU: really I can save you the trouble. Just come on over and spend some time in the organisations I work in – you’ll find plenty of abnormal behaviour to study, don’t waste a heap of Euros!

The project has a web-site and I list what it says the objectives are – then I will tell you what it really will be up to:

• to develop a platform for: the registration and exchange of operational data, acquisition of multimedia content, intelligent processing of all information and automatic detection of threats and recognition of abnormal behaviour or violence,
• to develop the prototype of an integrated, network-centric system supporting the operational activities of police officers, providing techniques and tools for observation of various mobile objects,
• to develop a new type of search engine combining direct search of images and video based on watermarked contents, and the storage of metadata in the form of digital watermarks.

The main expected results of the INDECT project are:

• to realise a trial installation of the monitoring and surveillance system in various points of city agglomeration and demonstration of the prototype of the system with 15 node stations,
• implementation of a distributed computer system that is capable of acquisition, storage and effective sharing on demand of the data as well as intelligent processing,
• construction of a family of prototypes of devices used for mobile object tracking,
• construction of a search engine for fast detection of persons and documents based on watermarking technology and utilising comprehensive research on watermarking technology used for semantic search,
• construction of agents assigned to continuous and automatic monitoring of public resources such as: web sites, discussion forums, UseNet groups, file servers, p2p networks as well as individual computer systems,
• elaboration of Internet based intelligence gathering system, both active and passive, and demonstrating its efficiency in a measurable way.

Say what? You understand any of this twaffle? Let me translate for you:

• secret squirrel geeky dudes will create agents to trawl and scurry around the internet, poking and snooping into web sites, discussion forums, social networks, individual computers, P2P networks;
• it will also collect data and images from surveillance cams, CCTV
• it will store all the juicy stuff it finds in a huge central database (probably lovingly nicknamed by the geeky types, Panopticon)
• the juicy tidbits of information about you will be “behaviorally profiled”. Secret squirrel codes will be written to identify patterns of “abnormal behaviour” across Europe. This will include voice pitch, the way someone stands, eye movements and so on
• all juicy tidbits of information about you (including private or sensitive) will be tagged, flagged and shared amongst European police forces (heck, give up on Project Indect – why not just create a pan-European police force?)
• secret squirrel types (Government, police, any interested authorities) will be able to whip up a personal dossier on you in a matter of minutes. Some idiot EU politician will lovingly refer to this as “a single source of truth”.
• Indect – they clearly misspelt INDICT – because that is what will happen to you. God knows what innocent thing you might do to glean the attention of this artificial intelligence crap system; get the knock on the door in the middle of the night; be spirited off and then indicted for some “abnormal behaviour” (or for what you might do based on profiling).
• this is about predicting the likelihood to offend. It’s about modelling potentially criminal and anti-social behaviour and focusing on individuals BEFORE crimes are committed.
• this is not about keeping EU citizens safe and tucked up in bed not having to worry about so-called terrorist threats. This is not about creating a more secure society.
• this sounds more like an initiative to help police forces – something they can use to round up dissenters.

Really, my tolerance for this sort of stupidity is getting very low. If you want to know what type of society we’ll end up living in, you can turn to no-one more intelligent and insightful than Aldous Huxley. This may be an ancient, quaint TV interview (with interviewer Mike Wallace smoking and I think from 1958) and it may be talking about the US but if you ask me, it’s just as relevant today. Watch these videos, listen carefully to what he is saying. Think. Reflect. Particularly about misuse of powers. Aldous Huxley implores us not to be taken by surprise but to be eternally vigilant about our civil liberties.

Google opt out feature

Just love this. For those of us concerned about Google and privacy, watch this. If you’re not concerned but just want to have a chuckle, watch it anyway.

Dancing down the aisle

I’m suffering a bout of flu at the moment (non-Swine) so I need a bit of cheering up. And how good is this? An American couple dancing down the aisle. Instead of the traditional wedding ceremony (which at the best of times I find boring), this couple boogied on down the aisle to Forever by Chris Brown (mmm….considering the video is a viral hit, it might help Brown’s career given his recent behaviour).

The groom somersaults, the bridesmaids shimmy down the aisle wearing sunglasses; and the bride, who looks fab, glides on down shaking her hips! It’s the most joyous thing I’ve seen in ages. So here it is to start your week and bring a smile to your face. I predict a lot more couples might do this for their wedding.

Credit crisis visualised

Whilst trying to come to grips with the global financial crisis, I’ve been reading and researching. Came across this YouTube video, which explains how the credit crisis happened but what’s particularly interesting is that the videos were put together by a Media Design student, Jonathan Jarvis, as part of a thesis project. He wanted to explore the use of new media to make sense of an increasingly complex world.

So he uses animated figures and images to explain in simple, visual terms what the heck happened. Here are the videos for your viewing pleasure (Parts 1 and 2).

Networks and blogs

I’ve been doing some research over the last few weeks for my “day job” (working with networks and communities of practice in a legal environment) and for a consulting gig I’m doing (putting together a training programme for lawyers). So I was going to prepare a guide to networks and communities but why bother now that I’ve struck gold?!!

Check out this 100+ page guide to networks I found on the Swiss Resource Centre & Consultancies for Development site. Everything and anything I could possibly have thought of to include in a guide to networks is in this document, including a run down of tools and techniques to support knowledge sharing. And so being the good KM practitioner that I am, I’m sharing this with you   There’s other stuff on the site that will be of interest to KM people so check it out.

Also, nosing around on social media and lawyers, I came across the US Air Force. Apparently, the Air Force is embracing Twitter and I stumbled onto their Rules of Engagement for Blogging, which includes this blog assessment chart that outlines how to respond to blog posts (mmm….looks handy for individuals and corporates too):

Click here to see a larger version of the flowchart and here to read more about how the US Air Force is using social media (seems to me organisations should be looking at the Air Force dudes as a role model). A number of organisations I’ve dealt with are SLOW to embrace social media preferring to stick with tired communication channels like newsletters and Q&A (answers from the CEO are of course spun-doctored to death by the Corporate Comms people until no truth is left in the response).

The US Air Force has a pretty nifty blog, they are on YouTube and dabble in podcasts too. Seems they’re pretty serious about social media. Which led me to check out the Royal Australian Air Force. I found them on Facebook but couldn’t find a blog – anyone know?

We’re living in a giant hologram

I knew it! Our world is nothing more than a giant hologram. Some dudes in Germany have stumbled onto what could be the most important of scientific discoveries. There’s this thing called the GEO600 experiment going on in the countryside of Hanover. The experiment has been focusing on discovering Einstein’s theorised gravitational waves, which are ripples in space-time caused by dense objects such as supernovae, spinning neutron stars and black holes (the black holes in space-time are not to be confused with any black hole of an organisation you might be working in!).

But instead of detecting gravitational waves, scientists have been plagued by inexplicable noise and interference patterns. An American physicist, Craig Hogan, believes he has the answer. The noise is coming from the point at which space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and becomes grainy. Granularity produces minute convulsions that are said to be characteristic of a holographic universe. So this would mean that scientists have literally stumbled onto quantum scale (ie very very small) points (imagine pixels).

The notion of a holographic universe is well-articulated in Michael Talbot’s book, based on the theories of David Bohm and neurophysiologist Karl Pribram (who both believe that the universe may be a giant hologram). I have a particular interest in Bohm’s work and wrote about holographic notions in my paper Is God Online?, which you can download here.

Because of convulsions being detected at the boundary of the universe, Hogan’s theory is suggesting that information about everything in the cosmos – including you and me – is encoded on the surface at the boundary of the universe (or event horizon) and projected so that we see the world and us as we do. This means that the world we seem to perceive and enjoy as 3-dimensional is in reality a 2-dimensional construct (so much for String Theory!) and projected from the far flung edge of the universe.

To understand this better, we need to consider black holes. Let’s think of a humongous star that has a hissy fit, implodes and becomes a black hole. As the star gets sucked into the black hole it passes the event horizon (ie the outer boundary of the black hole from which nothing can escape). The black hole’s entropy (or information content) is proportional to the surface area of its event horizon. So this means that all the information about the star’s 3-dimensional structure would be encoded in the 2-dimensional event horizon.

Given this, Hogan’s theory suggests that all the information inside our universe is encoded in the universe’s event horizon (ie the limit of the observable universe). It gets more creepy when we consider that the fundamental “grain” allowed by quantum theory in space-time is a planck length (1.6 x 10-36 metres). So this means that the information encoded in the universe’s event horizon would be held in planck length bits (ie really really really small).

From this (if I understand it correctly), Hogan is suggesting that each tiny bit of information encoded in Planck-length squares (or if you like, pixels or grains) would link or map to our reality somewhere inside the universe. And that reality is far bigger than the planck length scale I’ve been talking about.

The implications of this are quite staggering when you think about it.

• when we see a beautiful landscape, perhaps as we are on a road trip and the sun is setting and the landscape is bathed in a beautiful golden light – well, we’re not really seeing that reality at all. We are seeing signals or information transmitted to where we’re standing from the edge of the universe. A signal that is contained within a tiny bit of information encoded in Planck-length squares at the event horizon of the universe. And these signals we receive in our brain so the holographic image exists only within us as series of electrical impulses.  And so the brain is a hologram.
• and when was the information encoded? billions of years ago?  And so this means everything we are doing, absolutely everything, is predetermined and so there is such a notion as destiny?
• where does consciousness exist? In the event horizon of the universe? Are we therefore nothing more than fancy antennas receiving signals? And does it mean that all consciousness is shared since we are all sharing the same encoded information?  if so, then that makes ESP an understandable concept I think.
• how do we translate the information encoded into a sense of reality and, furthermore, into a sense of shared reality?
• so does this mean that space-time is not continuous and therefore particles can act unexpectedly or erratically (well, we saw this in the double-slit experiment).
• will this help scientists realise The Theory of Everything?
• could the information encoded be duplicated so that there are multiverses out there (and creepy but what an intriguing question – exact copies of you and me?). In other words, there could be other states of our existence that we simply do not perceive.
• and invoking The Matrix – who or what has created all the encoded information? A super computer? Some pimply kid from the year 5010 playing games with us?

So many more questions I could ask: What of God? What of the soul? Is Creation continuous?

You can get a more scientific run-down from this New Scientist article. But be quick, as NS only offers articles free for a short period of time before they disappear behind a subscriber-only wall. But at least I’ve summarised it for you.

If the NS article is scientific mumbo-jumbo, then you can watch these two interesting videos I found on YouTube – The Holographic Universe – Beyond Matter Part 1 and Part 2. Part 2 is probably more pertinent to this post although you may or may not agree with the conclusion.

Well off for a lie-down!

Image credit: HubbleSite

CoPs 101

Once again, I find myself in need of explaining CoPs (communities of practice) to people I’m working with. I’ve been working with CoPs since 2002 in the same organisation. There’s been the usual ups and downs – a couple of CoPs bit the dust (really because they’d reached the limits of their purpose); senior management have tried to get their claws into the CoPs or grilled me over ROI on the CoPs; and the CoPs have survived a recent restructure.

In fact, I now have an explosion of CoPs on my hands due to a recent announcement by our top dog that CoPs are an important part of our KM initiative. All good. I’m still surviving! But I’ve run across a whole heap of people new to the organisation or in another related area (like L&D or IT) who don’t really understand this CoPs business. So I have a mix of people on my hands: some old warriors who have been in a particular CoP for 5 or 6 years and some new people who are excited by the whole concept but haven’t had the “CoP experience” so don’t quite know what’s up.

It’s actually getting quite interesting now – finally, I have an L&D crew who want to (gasp!) work with me (KM) and we are approaching credentialling via learning pathways (formal and informal curriculum, with CoPs being the informal part). Anyway, I trawled through YouTube to see what I could find in the way of organisations and CoPs or people explaining CoPs.

The first one is CoPs 101 (I’ll be using it!) – Communities of Practice Explained – within the context of the UK Government.

And this led me to the following website – Communities of Practice for Local Government. I found tons of CoPs, including a valuable Facilitator’s Community for facilitators to share tips about online facilitation.

Then I came across this video about Caterpillar’s sharing culture and their 4,000 CoPs.

There were a couple of things in the video I don’t agree with but hey, I’m in a good mood so I’ll lay off!